Her heart broke. She dropped to her knees and cried. Her sobs echoed around her under the iron bridge. She fell forward onto her hands and watched her troubled tears fall into the calm still water of the canal.

What had happened? What had she done? How she had looked forward to this day. And now..?

She looked at the dress in her dark reflection, the dress she made in anticipation of this day. She snivelled and choked and poured more tears in the canal, expecting her sorrow to breach it’s banks. The more she looked at herself in the water, the more it seemed she belonged there, and her tears stopped and her breathing calmed. She stared silently into the cold darkness.

Could she do it? Was it deep enough? Was she too scared? What was she really scared of losing?

Just a little push. Just a little push…

Her breaths became shallower. She started panting and sweating. Her fingers gripped and released and gripped and released on the canal bank. Her stomach jumped and pulled violently. Pigeons all burst from their hiding places and fled. It startled her and she ran. Scrambled on all fours. She followed his scent. And she ran to burst her heart. She would not lose him now.

They walked along in silence. They had not travelled far when the sky opened. He took her hand and led her over a low wall and down an embankment to the canal, where they took shelter under an iron railway bridge.

Laughing and catching her breath, she scraped the wet hair from her face. “I’m soaked through!”

He only stared at her. From the far end of the leaden sky, an orange glow was skipping off the canal into her glistening face. She stopped straightening her damp dress. “I must look a right state.”

She legged it over the gate into the railway yard and he followed her. Under a leaden sky they ran. She didn’t look back as she skipped between wagons, running her hands along their chassis, through grease and grime. As he caught up with her and grabbed at her waist, she turned and pushed her hand into his face. She smushed the smut into his cheeks and forced his mouth on hers, a tang of vinegar on her lips, her tongue still salty.

“Not here,” she gasped. Her eyes darted furtively around as her blackened hands snatched at his shirt collar. She led him into the coal black shadow in the lee of the old loco shed, leaving a trail of shirt buttons. He gripped her tight. Coal, iron, oil, skin. Bit into her shoulder. Drew her hair into one length and wound it into his fist. Snapped her head back, their eyes locked, her panting mouth breathing close into his.

He unfastened the button at the nape of her neck, pulled the dress from her left shoulder, then her right, and made her bare to the waist.

She flung her arms around his neck and hoisted herself onto the stack of railway sleepers behind her, where he laid her down, white skin on black wood, and flung her skirt and petticoat up. With her legs slung over his shoulders, her little fishcake belly trembled to each shunt he gave.

“I’ll not be yours,” she said, “unless you take me.”

Their eyes hard upon each other, he pushed all the more. She raised herself up, curled a hand around the back of his neck and drew his mouth to hers. He made to kiss her, but she bit his lip and pulled at it. He could taste his blood.

“Bang me harder. Deeper! Stretch me and make it hurt!” she said. “When I beg you to stop, keep going. If I cry, push harder. Force yourself into me.”

He studied the intensity in her eyes. Looking for a way to keep going, but he was losing it. Was she fantasising or expecting this? He stopped, still gripped between her legs.

“Is that what you really want?” He tucked his coal smeared shirt into his waist. “I can’t do that.”

“You’re not man enough?” There was no taunt in her words, and it threw him a little. He studied her face as she sat up bare chested, her black fingers wiping at her damp inner thighs, leaving black smutty streaks.

He felt a fat raindrop on the back of his neck and turned his attention to the sky. “We ought to get going,” he said. “There’s the smell of a storm in the air.”

On the far side of the Earth
The moon is telling of our love
Stars are falling like snowflakes
The tigers are crying
In each others jaws
On every moonlit limb
Birds are pressed feather to feather
And the heavens catch their breath
When I see myself in your eyes

We walk together
Thru scenes of our shared past
That I have no understanding of
Or power to change
The cratered kitchen
The entrenched bedroom
The unrecognisable twisted limbs
What could I have done?
“You could have done nothing
You think you hold the power to change me?
You hold my hand
Nothing more”
She wears a red glove
“So you might stop crying now”